We’re so pleased to announce that we have chosen a winner for the Spring 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition. A big, heartfelt congratulations goes to Emelie Griffin for winning the prize with her chapbook California Pompeii. Congratulations also to this year’s finalists and semi-finalists. Thanks to everyone who participated in the Spring 2025 BRCC!
Emelie Griffin’s work has received support from the Ucross Foundation, Inprint, the Academy of American Poets, and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference; and has been published by journals including Denver Quarterly, New England Review, and American Chordata. She teaches at Florida State University.
Selected Poem from California Pompeii
Horses on the Beach
An orange flame pierced
and then remade the forest more like itself.
Sparks, like misplaced stars, drifted.
Then, swarmed. As if the sun
had thrown itself down. Sun
in an ancient sense: giver, taker.
The eye could not correct that orange cast.
Eye, a ravine
the world pours through.
With full force, what’s seen
strikes the mind. The mind
hurts, unsure how to lace
beauty with disaster.
How like love this is—
our attention rearing up
in sudden nearness to an end.
The animal nerve said away.
The horses felt shade becoming heat
and ran from it.
Until cool sand, ocean sliding up
to pool in the ruts their hoofs carved.
The grey shapes of their damp heads
lifted and lowered in relief.
All that water, more
than they’d known was in the world.